From MSNBC:
The United States must do more to safeguard Earth against destruction by an asteroid than merely prepping nuclear missiles, a new report has found.The 134-page report, released Friday by the National Academy of Sciences, states that the $4 million spent by the United States annually to identify all potentially dangerous asteroids near Earth is not enough to do the job mandated by Congress in 2005.
NASA is in dire need of more funding to meet the challenge, and less than $1 million is currently set aside to research ways to counter space rocks that do endanger the Earth — measures like developing the spacecraft and technology to deflect incoming asteroids — the report states.
An early draft of the report, entitled “Defending the Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard-Mitigation Strategies,” was released in August 2009. The final report, written by a committee of expert scientists, says is ill-equipped to catalog 90 percent of the nearby asteroids that are 460 feet (140 meters) across or larger, as directed by Congress.The United States should also be planning more methods of defending Earth against an asteroid threat in the near-term. Nuclear weapons should be a last resort — but they’re also only useful if the world has years of advance notice of a large, incoming space rock, the report states.
[Read more at MSNBC]
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